What Makes a Good Rabbit?

Middle-distance and distance runners who are close to world-class but never quite reached the upper echelon, or who were top-tier athletes and have, over time, slipped a rung, do have another career path as an option. They can become “rabbits,” runners paid to set the pace for contestants who’ll follow closely in their wake, usually for about half a race, but in the case of the mile or 1500, sometimes all the way up to the final lap.

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Matt Scherer is one of the successful and coveted rabbits of the moment and, as he tells the Spikes website, his journey to becoming a rabbit is somewhat typical. Scherer was a 1:46 800-meter runner who, at the end of 2009, was “faced with a decision. I hadn’t run any PBs in two years and I wasn’t making a lot of money,” he recalls. ”I had to either retire and get a real job, or try pacing.” He tried it and was excellent at it. In 2012, Scherer says, “I got a lot of jobs because it was an Olympic year, and so many athletes were chasing times.”

The job of rabbit requires, as Scherer puts it, “a good sense of pace and also an awareness of what is going on around you. Most of the time I’ll aim to run within a quarter of a second of the time I’m asked to run.” Some specific knowledge of the big guns behind him is also essential. David Rudisha, the world record holder and 2012 Olympic champion in the 800, “talked me through the fact he likes to sit three or four meters behind the pacemaker,” recalls Scherer. A 1500-meter race can represent “a whole different challenge. For me the most important thing for any 1500m athlete is to not go off too fast, so I might wait 100m or 120m before I hit the front,” he points out.

Scherer considers rabbiting “a great way to extend your career for several more years.” That’s what David Krummenacker, the 2003 world indoor 800-meter gold medalist, did. Scherer calls Krummenacker “the best ever” among track’s rabbits and states, “I don’t remember him doing anything other than a perfect pacing job.”

Krummenacker, for a spell, was America’s best middle-distance runner. And more than any other elite runner I’ve ever come across, he was the absolute epitome of equanimity. Abundantly talented, he strangely never seemed “fierce.” And, at least visibly, his reaction to success or failure was pretty much the same.

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The deeply religious Krummenacker “never prayed for victory," he said in a 2011 Runner’s World article, "just that I would perform to the best of my ability and everyone else would remain healthy and run well.”

A guy with skills, and who legitimately hopes for the best for his running peers, is perhaps ideally suited to be a rabbit. “When a race is paced evenly and there are good times, I feel joyful to have been a part of that process," Krummenacker insisted. He maintained, “There's a camaraderie among runners, a feeling of wanting to help the other guy out, and that really extends to pacemakers.”

Rabbiting doesn’t always work out perfectly, of course. Some fledgling rabbits (bunnies?) get overeager and run so far ahead of the field that their efforts are of no use to the athletes hoping to be pulled along to a fast race. On other occasions, a rabbit can hit the agreed-upon pace but look over his shoulder in confusion, wondering why the rest of the field has fallen 20 or more meters behind.

Twenty or, like, 70. Tom Byers, a talented American from Ohio, was rabbiting the fabled Golden Mile at Bislett Stadium in Oslo in 1981 for a roster of runners including British greats Steve Ovett and Steve Cram. But his lead was immense with a lap remaining, when he would normally drop out. He couldn’t think of a good reason why he shouldn’t finish the race. Which is what he did—in first place. There were complaints that other runners were being given Byers’ split times and not their own, but….dudes, he ran faster than you. He beat you.

After just missing making the Kenyan Olympic squad in 1996, Martin Keino, son of the great Kip Keino, had a long and legendary second career as a rabbit.

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“Daniel Komen, a fellow runner, wanted to break the two-mile world record,” Keino recalls in an article in Kenya’s Standard Media. “My coach requested me to help him achieve his dream by pacesetting the race. He did not only win but broke the world record by five seconds.” Keino was a pre-eminent rabbit for more than ten years, and the likes of Kenenisa Bekele and Haile Gebrselassie requested that he pace for them.

Rabbiting was very much on center stage in the most significant mile race of all-time. The pacing efforts of Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway were crucial to Roger Bannister’s achieving the first sub-4:00 mile in 1954. John Landy, the Australian who would soon break Bannister’s world record, reportedly took a dim view of the pacesetting ploy.

And he’s not alone. The advantages of having a rabbit are obvious. It probably provides more mental relief than physical; there’s a lot less to calculate and think about if someone is literally showing you the way.

But the negative aspects are plenty. To hear a well-paid runner complain when a rabbit allegedly doesn’t do his job perfectly, and speak as if this totally destroyed his race, comes across as petulant and childish. Why, one wonders, can’t these superstars just figure matters out for themselves?

More than a few times, rabbits confuse spectators and even commentators: What are they doing out there? Are they really in the race to contend or aren’t they? If you’re a well-versed running fan, you’ve probably, on more than one occasion, heard a commentator discuss someone as a serious challenger, when you’ve learned in advance that the person isn’t going to finish the race. This clouding of the competitive picture is one reason that several major marathons no longer enlist rabbits.

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This weekend, Matt Scherer will be in Birmingham, England to rabbit an 800-meter race that features Mohamed Amen of Ethiopia and Abubaker Kaki of Sudan. Why, one might ask? It’s nice he’s getting a payday, but why do so many races, even an indoor event lasting less than two minutes like this Birmingham one, have to be rabbited?

The greatest 800-meter race of all-time, and also the fastest, took place at the London Olympics last summer. The eight runners all ran their darnedest just to get to the final. But Rudisha still managed to break his own world record with a 1:40.91, and Nigel Amos of Botswana set a world junior record of 1:41.73 in second, and Duane Solomon and Nick Symmonds, in fourth and fifth, became the second- and third-fastest American 800 men of all-time. Last place in the race was 1:43.77. The eight men had the guts and the smarts and the sense of urgency to run this brilliant and thrilling race on their own, without the “guidance” of a rabbit. Wouldn’t we like to see more races like that one?

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